DreamHost Review – Reviews and Coupons of Dream Host Web Hosting

We organized for this DreamHost review by purchasing our DreamHost review account anonymously as a new client would via their website using their site menu. It is very important to us to have purchased this account anonymously so as to avoid bias from DreamHost at the same time pretest their services and give them an exceptionally sincere and objective review.

About DreamHost

DreamHost was founded in 1997 by four Californian Computer Science undergraduates. The company’s growth has been tremendous with 50 full-time staff and well over 500,000 domains hosted. This rapid increase has currently ranked DreamHost as one of the key players in the web hosting business with great customer retention especially the original ones.

Notwithstanding, DreamHost has had its fair share of up and downs. Interestingly, their loyal customers have many a times defended DreamHost when negatively critized. Customer satisfaction has been accredited to the company’s apparent nature of management as well as having great problem solving skills. DreamHost has even gone the extra mile to share their experiences with the world through their very humorous monthly newsletters and official company blog.

Hosting 500,000+ domains requires a high-tech hardware together with the DreamHost data centre which consists of hundreds of multi-CPU servers running on the Debian Linux to efficiently and effectively meet the needs and requirements of the customers. The DreamHost data centre is hosted by a heavy duty UPS back-up system, a back-up generator with multiple redundant gigabit connections to the Internet.

Plan Features and Pricing

Currently, DreamHost is offering four diverse web hosting shared plans with different price tags. The main difference between these four plans is the disk space vis a vie the bandwidth quotas. The higher the disk space and greater the bandwidth the costly the price tag. Truth be told, the bottom “Level 1” plan is sufficient for all website needs and requirements excluding the busiest websites. In this review, we will specifically focus on the bottom “Level 1” plan otherwise known as “Crazy Domain Insane” hosting plan.

The ‘Crazy Domain Insane’ hosting plan that we anonymously purchased specifically for this review offers 200GB of disk space and 2000GB (or 2 Terabytes) of monthly data transfer/bandwidth at a cost of just $5.80 per month for your first year of hosting when using DreamHost’s special PRICESLASH DreamHost promo code.

DreamHost has a very attractive incentive to their loyal customers called the “loyalty bonus”. Each week you use DreamHost’s “Level 1” space and bandwidth you have the advantage of your own disk space increasing by 1GB as well as your data transfer/bandwidth by 16GB both on a weekly basis. This has led to great customer loyalty to DreamHost services, customer retention and referrals over the years.

Please find below a detailed table showing all the features customers enjoy for the DreamHost “Level 1” package. For a full listing of this and other DreamHost hosting plans, please visit the DreamHost web site.

Key features of DreamHost Level 1 plan (as reviewed)

• 200GB disk storage space (increases by 1GB per week)
• 2000GB monthly data transfer / bandwidth (increases by 16GB per week)
• host unlimited domains under the one account
• Unlimited sub-domains
• Free domain name registration included with account
• Free Domain WHOIS privacy included
• 3000 POP3 or IMAP e-mail accounts
• SPAM-assassin e-mail filtering
• Unlimited MySQL databases
• Powerful custom-written control panel
• Daily snapshot data backups
• PHP4, PHP5, Perl, Python, CGI and Ruby / Ruby on Rails scripting
• One-click install & upgrade of popular software packages
• Full custom .htaccess files
• crontab access for periodic task execution
• Shell access via Telnet or SSH
• 97 day money back guarantee

Note: The DreamHost web site indicates disk space and data transfer figures reduced considerably than the 200GB/2000GB shown in this review. Nevertheless, if you sign up for the DreamHost “Level 1” using our special PRICESLASH DreamHost promo code you will receive the 200GB/2000GB indicated in this review, as well as a good $50 instant discount. DreamHost space and data transfer plans are also significantly increased from those shown on the DreamHost website. The $50 discount is valid for all DreamHost plans when using the promo code, including monthly and yearly.

Control Panel

cPanel is a Unix based web hosting control panel that provides a graphical interface and automation tools designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site. Unlike other service providers, DreamHost have customized and personalized their own software front face called the cPanel. The DreamHost cPanel offers different functional levels which is both user friendly, easy to use and is superior quality to the original cPanel. In addition, The DreamHost cPanel gives great functionality to website owners to control the various aspects of website and server administration.

Day to day tasks such as managing your billing account, creating a database of email addresses, installation of software, registering domains which includes DNS configuration can be done very conveniently via the DreamHost cPanel. Manual input of data is also an option provided by the DreamHost cPanel. DreamHost also supplies a web-based File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Due to limitation, DreamHost recommends the use of a “real” FTP client at all times.

One feature that DreamHost does not offer is the page creation utility hence one will require to design the website locally on the their computer then upload the relevant files to the DreamHost web space using the ‘one-click-install’ feature on the cPanel.

Scripting Support

The different DreamHost shared plans support the full range of server-side scripting languages, including PHP4, PHP5, CGI, Perl, Python and Ruby / Ruby-On-Rails. CRON access is available for scripts that run at regular intervals. Customized .htaccess files are readily available on a domain or sub-domain basis. DreamHost gives full access on SSH and Telnet to all accounts.

The DreamHost cPanel has a unique and user friendly feature which provides for the ‘one-click install’ (and upgrade) of various popular scripts, such as WordPress, Joomla, phpbb, Gallery2 and MediaWiki. The number of applications available through this ‘one-click install’ page is few but most of the popular packages are represented. Evidently, packages not supported through this page can be installed manually.

Reliability

DreamHost has made tremendous efforts to remain the most reputable service provider. This has not been easy given the challenges experienced in outages over the first few months of the pretesting phase with the pretest site being unreachable for hours on end. Customers were at some point very frustrated as they experienced long off-line periods.

Most of the downtime was due to scheduled maintenance with advance warning to customers. However, erratic outages occurred that made the site unavailable for extensive periods. DreamHost is currently putting strong measures to curb the erratic outages and return to the excellent reliable service provider.

The strongest quality that DreamHost have had is transparency with their customers during the challenges. One customer said “DreamHost’s level of communication and honesty was refreshing, I had confidence in them that they would resolve the situation and return us to normalcy. That was exactly what happened.” These and many more sentiments from customers made DreamHost a reliable service provider and are proud to have loyal customers who stayed with them through thick and thin.

Technical Support

DreamHost “Level 1” provided technical support through work tickets sent via the modern DreamHost cPanel. Frequently Asked Questions were posted on the website for ease of reference at the same time direct queries were answered promptly, within 12 hours. Responses to clients were warm and friendly at the same time provided solutions to the customer’s queries. DreamHost are in the process of recruiting more support staff to meet the rising customers demand and the response time will eventually reduce substantially.

Customers within the United States had the privilege of a limited number of support “call backs” a month. Hopefully, out of the country customers will be targeted in the next trial phase. DreamHost does maintain a customer support for which is an excellent source of information for customers.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the DreamHost “Level 1” plan gives you excellent value for your money. The starting quantity of 200GB of disk-space and 2000GB of monthly data transfer/bandwidth has been tested and proven as sufficient for many busy websites.

In the recent past, DreamHost test site has been experiencing unexpected outages giving a negative impression over the otherwise best hosting service provider in the world. DreamHost have put in secured measures to avoid future occurrences of the same.

We encourage you to take advantage of the DreamHost “Level 1” promotion now and enjoy an instant discount of $50 and increased disk space of 1GB and 16GB of bandwidth. Use your DreamHost promo code now!

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